🌙 Last night around midnight I went to feed my starters for a little experiment I've been wanting to run. Stiff starter, two jars, side by side. One fed with water, one fed with pineapple juice. Same flour, same ratios, same temperature, same everything except the liquid. Except my kitchen scale had other plans. ⚖️ Scale Trouble The display started flashing "unstable." Then the numbers just started running. 12g. 47g. 3g. 89g. Whether there was anything on the scale or not. I sat there for a few minutes trying to coax it back to life, recalibrate, reset, the whole routine. Nothing. So I did what bakers did before digital scales existed. I went by volume. A quarter cup of liquid in each jar (water in one, pineapple juice in the other), and a half cup of flour each. Stirred them stiff, capped them, and went to bed. 🔬 What I Found This Morning Nine and a half hours later, both jars had risen to about the same height. Domed caps, pulled away from the sides of the glass, looking active. From the front, they looked like twins. But from the top, the story changed. 🔹 The pineapple jar (left): glossy, slack surface. Bubbles broken open. Bigger, more open holes throughout the body when you look through the side of the glass. The structure had given way. 🔹 The water jar (right): tighter, drier surface. You could still see the swirl pattern from how I mixed it. Smaller, more uniform bubbles. The structure was still holding. 🧠 Why This Happens Pineapple juice brings two things plain water doesn't: sugar and acid. Sugar gives the wild yeast a faster food source, so fermentation accelerates. Acid drops the pH and starts breaking down the gluten structure. Together they push a starter past peak faster and degrade its structure even at stiff hydration. Same rise height. Completely different internal behavior. 📌 The Takeaway Pineapple juice is a great tool for waking up a brand new starter in the first few days. The acid suppresses the bad bacteria long enough for your wild yeast to get established. But once you have a healthy, mature starter, pineapple juice isn't doing you any favors. It just accelerates fermentation and breaks down the structure you've worked to build.

If you’ve been doing fermentolyse with me, you’ve probably had this moment. You add the salt. You start working it in. And suddenly the dough looks like it’s coming apart. Tearing. Going lumpy. Falling away in pieces in your hands. A lot of bakers panic right there. Some grab more flour. Some start over. Some assume they ruined the bake. Don’t. This is normal. And here’s why it happens. Salt tightens gluten. That’s its job. But when you sprinkle salt across the top of a dough and start pinching it in, the salt doesn’t hit the dough evenly. There’s more salt in some spots than others. The gluten where the salt is concentrated tightens fast. The gluten where there’s no salt yet stays slack. Tight gluten next to slack gluten means the dough literally pulls apart. You’re watching two different doughs in the same bowl, briefly, while the salt finds its way through. Keep working it. Pinch and fold. Wet hands. Two to three minutes of patient incorporation. The salt distributes, the gluten evens out, and the dough comes back together stronger than it was before. Then rest for 45 minutes before your first coil fold. That’s when you’ll really see the structure show up. This is the kind of thing you only learn by watching the dough through the moment instead of bailing on it. Trust the process. Saturday’s poppy seed bake is going to give a lot of you this exact moment. Now you know what to do when it shows up. Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥